Attempting to rub a smudge off the phone’s screen while it was booting causes problems:
Rebooting that sucker cleared the problem, so it wasn’t permanently fatal.
Whew!
Category: Oddities
Who’d’a thunk it?
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Soaker Hose Splices: End Of Life
The soaker hoses from Mary’s garden all came from someone else and have now reached their second end of life:
Soaker Hose Splices – end of life Those orange lumps kept them alive for a few more seasons:
Soaker Hose Splices – harvested In the unlikely event I ever give another in-person presentation about 3D printing and what it’s good for, I’ll have some interesting show-n-tell samples. Might have to soak the dirt off, though.
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Vultures Sunning
Spotted after pre-season prep at Mary’s Vassar Farms garden:
Vultures sunning It must feel really good up there atop the old barn, even if they’re sunning themselves to kill off parasites.
Taken with the Pixel 3a zoomed all the way in at 7× from a bit over 200 feet:
Vultures sunning – photo range Then cropped and sharpened just a smidge. Not a great picture, but good enough for practical purposes; the Good Camera + Big Glass takes better pix and is too awkward to carry in my pocket.
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Blog Impulse Response: Water Heater
Somebody posted a Reddit comment linking to my post about a sensibly implemented water heater anode rod, with predictable results:
Blog Impulse – 2021-03 Reddit’s New Hotness has a half-life well under a day, although a steady trickle of incoming traffic will continue forever: The Internet Never Forgets.
Protip: forcing Reddit URLs to old.reddit.com eliminates the user-hostile site layout. Manual tweaking suffices for my very few visits; you can find browser extensions for on-the-fly rewriting.
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Adhesive vs. Concrete: Tenacity Thereof
Sometimes, sticky labels hold on forever:
Faded NO PARKiNG sign It’s standing near what was once the Red Oaks Mill dam, which continues to disintegrate:
Red Oaks Mill Dam – 2021-02-25 Sixteen years ago, the dam was in better shape:
Red Oaks Mill Dam – 27 Feb 2005 Maybe the sign was shiny-new back then?
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Rust Never Sleeps
Spotted at the corner gas station on a recent walk:
Gas pump barrier – smashed Judging from the tire tracks and extrapolating from recent weather, a snowplow driver misjudged the truck’s right-side clearance while backing.
That big steel tube didn’t put up nearly as much resistance as the architect figured after consulting the relevant building codes:
Gas pump barrier – right base The paint seems to have been the only thing holding the other side together:
Gas pump barrier – left base Google Streetview suggests the barriers were new-ish in May 2009:
Gas pump barrier – newish 2009-05 Steel is a great construction material, but it doesn’t fare well when installed at grade (or above) where it’s exposed to water and salt. On the other paw, they got over a decade out of it, so maybe it’s as good as it needs to be.
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123 Block Links: Blackened!
While looking for something else, I came across my bottle of Aluminum Black, so I just had to do this:
123 Block Links – blackened Looks much snappier than the originals:
123 Block Links – trial assembly Those are plain old alloy steel cap screws with a black oxide finish.
The Aluminum Black package directions tell you to apply it with a swab, rinse, and repeat, which seemed like a lot of work for a handful of pins. Instead, I poured a little into a pill bottle, dumped the pins in, and gave it a good shake to coat the pins, whereupon the cap blew off as the contents proceeded to boil merrily. A quick cold-water rinse calmed things down, with no particular harm done, although I had to chase the threads with a tap to get the black powder out. A layer of oil prettied them up nicely.
Today I Learned: the reaction between selenium dioxide and bare aluminum is strongly exothermic.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 